Union Learning Representatives in the United Kingdom:Between rhetoric and reality and denial

This chapter reviews the development and impact of ULRs in the UK, an <br/>innovative form of specialist representation that was part of wider union <br/>engagement with learning, training and skills issues as a facet of union <br/>‘renewal’ within the workplace and beyond. The chapter explores notions <br/>of mutual gains and contestation in relation to learning, the development of <br/>the ULR role within unionised workplaces, and the strategic but contested <br/>orientations of unions towards learning and ULRs. During the 1997–2010 <br/>Labour governments, this dimension of industrial relations was seen as a <br/>way of forging mutual gains between workers and management, engaging <br/>more marginalised workers in learning and their unions and contributing to <br/>a narrative of union renewal following two decades of union decline. How<br/>ever, the fragmented nature of the UK learning and skills system, the limits <br/>of ‘partnership’ approaches and a lack of institutional embeddedness for <br/>unions in terms of negotiating and bargaining over skills and training placed <br/>limits on their effectiveness even when government was broadly supportive <br/>of this work. Since 2010, austerity-driven retrenchment and marketisation <br/>of adult learning provision has created major challenges for the ULR role, <br/>including the contradictions of attempting to raise demand for increasingly <br/>difficult-to-access educational services, and the seeming marginalisation of the role due to wider pressures on union representative facility time from <br/>employers and in some cases a lack of support from unions themselves.